Dynamic Duos

December 6, 1998|By KAREN M. THOMAS and The Dallas Morning News

Spend a day with the Vernons. She's an obstetrician with a busy practice. He's an international attorney. On any given day, Kim Vernon might get called back to work to deliver a baby, rush to a mall to pick up a birthday gift or hurry home to get a family dinner on the table.

If Dr. Vernon is stuck at the hospital, then John Vernon covers, doing whatever is needed for the kids, 15-year-old Taylor and 13-year-old Lauren. He might drive them to a school sporting event. Unless, of course, something at the last moment has popped up at his job and instead he's headed to the airport bound for London.

If June and Ward Cleaver once represented the idealized American couple, the Vernons now represent the reality of couples of the 1990s. We're talking dual-career, fast-paced lives where husbands and wives juggle work schedules, kids' activities and day-to-day household tasks.

Call them the supercouple, a pair of superachievers willing to do whatever it takes to succeed professionally and raise their family well. But if they're not careful, says one married team of family therapists, they'll soon suffer from what they call supercouple syndrome.

"We call that two incomes, no sex," says Wayne Sotile, a North Carolina marriage therapist, who with his wife, also a therapist, recently wrote Supercouple Syndrome: How Overworked Couples Can Beat Stress Together (John Wiley & Sons Inc., $22.95).

Those suffering from the syndrome experience a loss of intimacy, friendship and romance with their partner. They're less able to weather outside upheavals such as job layoffs. And they're more likely to be drained and headed for divorce.

"There does seem to be a pattern," says Sotile. "In over 22 years of practice and after having counseled over 6,000 couples, we have learned from them. Couples who don't complain about communication, intimacy or friendship make the time for it."

The Sotiles' advice is simple. Somewhere in their chase for the big life, couples need to squeeze in time for themselves: Friday night dinner, a long walk Sunday morning, five minutes of uninterrupted time each day to catch up with each other.

If couples cannot afford frequent getaways alone, Sotile says they may have options. "You could trade off with another couple who have young children or ask grandmas and grandpas, aunts or friends to help."

Their book, they say, is a road map to help partners examine how they cope with stress, and if those strategies are in fact chipping away at their relationship. They also hope it helps couples create ways to buffer against the stress.

"The couple is truly the architect of the family, and as they go, so go the children," says Mary Sotile. "So when you suffer from hurry sickness or toxic behavior, your children will feel that and have it, too."

But the Sotiles say couples that include a spouse who stays home can suffer from supercouple syndrome, too. And so can couples without children.

While stresses may be different in those households, the couples can still drift apart without enough time to nurture their friendship and romance, they say.

"We talk a lot about dual career, but what we're talking about doesn't necessarily mean dual income. It's a thing where one's career can be out of the house while the other spouse's] career is running the house," says MarySotile.

When it's the women who decide to stay home, she says, there can be conflicting feelings.

"The thing is, if you choose to follow a career, you're going to grieve over missing the school play. And if you stay home, you grieve over that book you might have written," she says. "We need to have a sisterhood going on about these issues instead of dividing over them."

Dr. Vernon understands that. Even with her busy work life, she has worked hard to be a hands-on parent. She has chaperoned end-of-the-year parties, served as homeroom mother in one of her children's classrooms and had a live-in foreign exchange student.

"I am not trying to sound like superwoman. You do get frustrated," she says.

"At one point, I thought, `What am I doing?' I work. But when your kids are home, we do what we need for them because they won't be here for long."

Men face family stress, too, the Sotiles say. About two decades ago, 25 percent of men surveyed said they worried about balancing their work life and families. Now, the Sotiles say, recent surveys show that up to 75 percent of men have such worries.

And men who stay home to raise children face even more specific stresses, the Sotiles say.

Since men have traditionally been the breadwinners, many stay-at-home dads must battle the notion that somehow they just couldn't make it in the workforce. Some feel ashamed.

"Think about a neighborhood where most of the women stay home to raise children. What do those houses look like?" she says.

"Now think of a place where some of the men stay home. It's a different neighborhood. And we think that something is wrong with them, that they couldn't cut it."

The Vernons have worked hard to establish rituals. At least twice a year, the couple goes somewhere alone for about a week. They've learned to juggle their schedules to help each other. And they've learned to be flexible.

When their son was in first grade, a teacher evaluating the little boy told his parents that she thought he was struggling with the concept of time.

The boy had written that he ate dinner at 9 p.m. and the teacher thought that perhaps he mistakenly wrote 6 p.m. upside down.

"But I had to say, `No, that's right. He's eating at 9,"' says Dr. Vernon. "We're flexible. You let go of things like everybody sits down for dinner at 6:30 p.m."